Saturday, November 10, 2007

Monbiot explains, convincingly, how biofuels could kill more people than the Iraq war.

This is quite appalling,

A recent study by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen shows that the official estimates have ignored the contribution of nitrogen fertilisers. They generate a greenhouse gas - nitrous oxide - which is 296 times as powerful as CO2. These emissions alone ensure that ethanol from maize causes between 0.9 and 1.5 times as much warming as petrol, while rapeseed oil (the source of over 80% of the world’s biodiesel) generates 1-1.7 times the impact of diesel(12). This is before you account for the changes in land use.

I'm thinking that there is some merit in biofuel which comes from a waste product, like cooking oil from fish and chip shops in the UK. However, this is pretty small potatoes in the context of the broader macro scale biofuel smokescreen.